3 Day Novel 2011, Day 2, 11:45 pm

 

 This is my - Please let me finish the 3 Day Novel Photo

I have been working 10-14 hour days every day in the last week, so I decided to do the 3 Day Novel last minute this year. I was trying to gauge if I'd have enough energy to make it. The last time I had done it in 2009...it exhausted me. Completely. It was worth it, though. I got my first ebook out of it - Adventures in Funeral Crashing and it's a pretty awesome fun read, if I say so myself!  

Now, the 2nd day is almost done. I've been tweeting about it, but this is the first blog this year. It's been a rough one. I started out tired from a long work week... Not a good beginning...

DAY 1: I only made it to about 4000 words because I decided about a 1000 words in - bright and early - that I hated my whole novel. It was boring. It was stupid. Nothing interesting was hapenning. I practically gave up. Nothing could cheer me up. I took lots of naps. I started at the screen. The words dragged despite #2k1hr wordsprints with fellow 3 Day Novelists on Twitter (Follow me on Twitter!). About 10 pm I gave up and then spent the evening watching Mad Men. At least my life was way more optimistic than theirs...

DAY 2: I woke up refreshed! I was going to write 15,000 words today! I had an idea how to make my novel more interesting...add a Facebook fan page into it. After all I had just liked one about a cat who is lost in AA baggage claim at JFK - maybe that could make my novel more interesting - if the WORLD was watching my main character go on her journey! Twitter and my newfound friends doing the #2k1hr wordsprints definitely helped me throughout the day, despite my tendency toward procrastination - Starbucks, grocery shopping for Labor Day food because I was too busy to make a BBQ on Monday, playing with my dog, napping, blogging at 11:39 pm...

And, here's how the day broke out, word count-wise:

(started around 4,000 words - TERRIBLE - most people were over 10,000 at the start of the day...)

1:30 pm - 7024 words

5:00 pm - 8508 words

7:00 pm - 9315 words

8:00 pm - 10288 words

9:00 pm - 11257 words (I decided to clean at this point)

10:15 pm - 11771 words

11:00 pm - 12978 words (approx. 53 pages, 12 pt, double spaced)

It's now 11:45 pm and I am getting tired, despite the Rockstar I'm drinking. Still, I think I have at least another 1,000 words in me. That would put me shy of my 15,000 word goal and the 20,000 mark I was hoping for by the end of today, BUT I would have written a WHOPPING 10,000 words today. That's a lot of words, people.

And, besides, it gives me the lofty 15,000 word goal for tomorrow. I'd like to hit 30,000 words (a little over 100 pages) by the end...and, well, actually finish the novel (by getting to the end).

Wish me luck! Or, well, perseverence!

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For more about my 3 Day Novel experiences: 

Here's the start of the few blogs about my 2009 3 Day Novel experience (feel free to read them all by searching "3 Day Novel" on my blog). I went back and added about twenty thousand words to that one and you can now purchase it wherever ebooks are sold.

Check it out - Adventures in Funeral Crashing. I think it's a pretty fun read and so far even people I don't know seem to think so too! It's a YA murder mystery chick lit with the brief synopsis: Sixteen year old Kait Lenox has a reputation as the weird girl in her high school, mostly because of her ex-best friend turned mean popular girl, Ariel, but maybe it has a little to do with the fact that Kait has a hobby crashing funerals. At one of these, Kait is outted by the most popular guy in school, Ethan Ripley. Yet, instead of humiliating her for all the world to see, he asks for her help, and Kait finds herself entangled in a murder mystery. Not only is the thrill of the mystery exciting, but more importantly Ethan knows her name! A little sleuthing is well worth that!